Been putting off writing this review because with each book in this series, my emotions get more and more entangled and it’s basically agony to write about them because it makes me feel them all over again. Luckily, until about the last hundred pages, this book wasn’t as agony-filled as the rest of the Fitz books have been, but those last hundred pages sure make up for it. The rest of the book, though not exactly sad, was also emotionally intense. Basically, you’re signing up for a first-class conductor of words to mess with all your insides when you read any of these books.
Spoilers below for probably for most of the previous books in this large series.
This book picks up about fifteen years after the closing of the last Fitz trilogy. Fitz and Molly have been married and living with Patience on Chivalry’s old estate. It has been a happy life for them, but they are getting older. All of Molly’s children are adults now and living life of their own, and Molly and Fitz were not able to have any more children together. Then one day a messenger comes to their home in the middle of a large party, and Fitz doesn’t get to speak to her in time. She disappears, and he is left wondering what her message was. We the readers know something very bad happened to her. That incident sets the tone for the rest of the book, where strange and unsettling things keep happening to Fitz in his second retirement. We pass years and years.
Saying any more than that would really be doing future readers a disservice. All I will say is that for the first time in the Fitz books, there is another narrator besides Fitz himself. And they were absolutely fascinating.
I gotta tell you, while I’m extremely anxious to get to book two in December (I needed some months to recover from this one, and I kind of don’t even want to know how the terrible cliffhanger resolves) I am NOT looking forward to reading the last book, which is apparently amazing, but also breaks everyone who reads it. See: This video of a YouTuber I watch who openly weeps on camera for quite a while (the video is completely spoiler free).
Anyways, I don’t know how else to convey to you that you should read this series.
CBR BINGO: Heart
No one ensorcels my emotions like Robin Hobb, and this first book in the final Fitz trilogy, and (for now) The Realm of the Elderlings, absolutely does that.
. . . and still no BINGO. I’m determined to get at least ONE by the end of this.